One Story Town
Route 395 is one of only a few ways to get from Los Angeles to Yosemite on a Harley Davidson but judging by the Romanesque lines on the map, a pretty hard slog it looks too. After three days of soaring down the mythical Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles, 500 miles back north through the arse-end of nowhere is about as appetising as a walking holiday in Stoke-on-Trent, recently (and deservedly) identified by The Sunday Times property section as the nastiest place in the UK, if not the known universe.
Randsburg, advertised oxymoronically as a ‘Working Ghost Town’ is about four hours from where the asphalt bindweed of LA’s freeways end, the contiguous splendour of the High Sierra and Yosemite begins and the ideal spot for what San Franciscans primly term a ‘Comfort Break’.
Since the gold got mined out, the principal commercial activity of Randsburg is supplying chilled bottled water to YBS or Yuppie Biker Scum at $2 a pop. Yuppie Biker Scum is the collective epithet awarded by an upstanding citizen of Palo Alto to the swarms of mass-affluent (or should that be effluent?) Venture Capitalists who phut around his neighbourhood every Sunday afternoon keeping the outlaw spirit alive. Quite how punting on dubious technology companies with other people’s money makes these Master of the Universe natural descendants of the pioneers defies casual empiricism but at least it keeps them off the streets, metaphorically speaking.
So straddling a $20,000 rented Hog, sipping the precious liquid (the bottled water that is), consulting a handheld GPS, and thus conforming effortlessly with the YBS stereotype, the silver-haired General Store proprietor fresh from central casting stared at me with a look that said “this town ain’t big enough for the both of our moribund clichéd selves” and said: “I’d say you’re at 29 and North; 29 miles from nowhere and North of wherever.”
Wrong. Sixty miles north of Randsburg is Olancha, (Population: 39); the sort of find that you cannot discover through looking and home to two businesses so blissfully unaware of their unique, or at least rare, selling points and the commercial precarity of their proposition, they may not even exist by the time you read this. Mary Chapin-Carpenter’s elegy to the faded, forgotten Southern Midwest “I am a Town” provides the aural sketch for Olancha. An Edward Hopper painting with a Cello soundtrack, it is about somewhere in Carolina but every couplet rings true:
I'm the last gas for an hour if you're going twenty-five
I am Texaco and tobacco, I am dust you leave behind
I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age; I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I'm an old truck up on cinder blocks, missing all my wheels
I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American, and "Southern Serves the South"
I am tucked behind the Jaycees sign, on the rural route
I am a town
In truth, Olancha is not quite this vibrant. It comprises just a Motel, a diner, a gas-station and the Still Life Café. Starting with the motel, first impressions of Olancha and the motel were like Butch & Sundance alighting from the train in Bolivia when they expected the Central American version of Atlantic City and were met by a bunch of chickens scratching around in the dirt instead. I rode past the first time - agog- begging that my gout-ridden (and notably absent) hypochondriac travelling companion had booked the other motel of the same name. The one with a bar and the swimming pool, with toothsome, sun-drenched waitresses that say “Can I get you guys another beer?” The one with a shower that worked. Without a dead-lizard it. The one that didn’t look like Bates.
Michael Winner might have one or two gripes about the place but what can you expect for $33 a night? He could not complain about the butter being wrapped and comment disparagingly on how long ago the orange juice was squeezed for the simple reason that there is no food and absolutely no facilities to speak of. Still, it is tolerably clean if one draws a discrete veil (literally) over the lizard. The couple who run it are sweet-natured but probably inducted into the hospitality industry long before the distinction between guest and stranger was fully articulated. That said, the vacuous, “I know how you feel sir/I can appreciate what you are saying sir (but I’m not doing anything at all to help you)” bullshit that Radisson dished a few nights previous had me seriously doubting Ben Elton’s comment on the American service ethic. Asked to express his preference between the vacuity of “have a nice day” to being told to f*** off by someone who really meant it, he voted against honest, Anglo-Saxon obscenity. But on this occasion, and by a narrow margin, slightly grizzled but unfailingly sincere wins on points.
So what are the dining & entertainment options for the visitor to Olancha? Well, the phrase “extremely limited” cannot convey the highly selective range on offer. The ubiquitous diner up the road on the left closes at five having lost its liquor licence (reason: too many drunken cowboys, fighting) and so is no good for dinner. There is the gas station, offering a truly stupendous range of hard-core pornography depicting sexual fantasies so retarded, they cannot even be charted. Also available are a range of various US bottled beers, all reminiscent of sex in a canoe (f***ing close to water) and to eat sir, how about some beef jerky, a blackened, gnarled confection so vile I reached for the pay-phone to dial 1-800-UN War Crimes Inspectorate. Or…… there is the Still Life Café.
In a world strewn with detritus of commercial ventures that made perfect sense to their creators and left everybody else scratching their heads, the Still Life Café makes the Sinclair C5, oxygen bars and dot.com ventures dreamt up by West London public schoolboys look like beacons of commercial sensibility.
By day, Still Life is a diner attracting a small but predictable clientele of road-warriors, farmers and assorted nutcases of one sort or another. By night, the fiery Delilah and the French-speaking man with no name behind the stove do their best to bring a little of the Eighth Arrondissement to the middle of the California desert. Unfailingly true to the original, it is not without compromises and challenges. Choice is limited to two or three options per course with an obvious standout choice at each stage that leads me to suspect there is actually no choice at all. Ah, so maybe chef will allow the diner to request some liddle variaashun to meet sir or madam’s particular appetite this delightful evening? No way. “He’s mad and French,” explained Delilah “you get it the way he says”. So, something to drink m’siur? Mmm. OK. We’re in the desert. It is hot. I saw a cactus a while back and I am a tourist. What about a frozen Margherita? “No chance, we have no ice – how about a kir?”
Kir? What? Here? They look at you a bit funny in New York when you ask for Kir so how come this is the ‘Boisson du jour’ here? It didn’t taste like kir – don’t know what it tasted of - but it was fabulous. Same goes for the starter billed as an avocado gazpacho that had a consistency somewhere between Angel Delight and KY Jelly, was the same hue as a 1979 Kawasaki and mercifully tasted like none of the above. In the brief interlude between field and plate, John-Paul Belmondo in the kitchen had done something to immeasurably improve on this sad relic of the Surrey dinner party creating an astringent balm against the heat of the day to both palate and body. It tasted OK too.
Main’s maintained the high standard. While Steak Au Poivre has become yawning gastronomic shorthand for a Mike Leigh vision of suburban hell, embodied as an overcooked strip of shoe leather asphyxiated with pepped up Bisto, the Stiff Life version effortlessly challenges and destroys this prejudice. A perfect, identifiable hunk of cow (rather than USDA approved, beef-flavoured plasticine), seared with millimetric perfection sitting in an expertly emollient puddle of sauce precisely livened with shards of peppercorn. Vegetables so perfectly diced it would make foodie anal-retentives the world over sharpen their Sabatiers in joyous celebration. An arrogantly simple dessert of fresh grilled pineapple with vanilla pods rounded things off a treat. The wine list also deserves a special mention as ‘exclusively French’ implies an inverted eclecticism that is very rare in California and wholly untrue in this instance. ‘Nothing outside of Bordeaux at insanely reasonable prices’ is nearer the mark. I forget precisely what we had but it was good soft easy drinking that had enough of what we call ‘helmet and throbble’ here in Essex to make one bottle satisfactory for four Betty Ford candidates and cost less than $30. It was possible to spend more but not by much.
Which brings me to the bill. The night before, Wolfgang Puck’s fabulous Chinois on Main in Santa Monica had relieved us of nearly $300 which, all things considered, is a bit of a bargain considering it is an absolute one-off, a high-quality one at that, and just a short cab ride from Mammon Central. It is unfair to compare Chinois with Still Life for they are no parallels but the bottom line is you expect Saturday night in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest region of the world - ever - to be in a different league, Brian, to a place stuck in the middle of the desert. That it is comparable in price and worth every shekel is a testament to the evident skill and talent of Jean-Paul and the haughty disregard for conventional business wisdom displayed by him and Delilah. It is churlish to even discuss the price suffice to say it is probably the best value meal I have had in the last year and probably the most surprising ever.
We had walked the mile and a half from the motel in the hope of getting tired and emotional on chilled beer and Captain Jack (Daniels). As they don’t do any of this and Delilah runs front-of-house unaided, the bar service is leisurely to put it politely. Soberly contented in the way that only genuinely good food can make you feel, we tried to work out how to get back to the ranch as Gouty could not manage the walk back. We asked for a taxi and got soundly admonished as prime-time fantasists, Delilah explaining that a population of thirty-nine cannot quite justify a round-the-clock cab service although she did not use precisely these words. Instead, she got her man in the kitchen to do the honours. So we piled into his knackered-Datsun and he drove us back up the desert road, cigarette hooked over his sneering lower lip pretending not to understand a word of Gouty’s flawless A - level French.
The sun rises early in Olancha and by seven, the sky is deep, blue, perfect and vast. It is the right time to thank your particular God that you are right here, in this fabulous, contrary, country and with another five hundred miles to ride on a motorbike and spectacular new sights to see. I had woken early with a totally clear head, and nothing to do so I went out to take these pictures. No one left and no one came. Still Life is more than a name.
